In the present scenario, when a user subscribes a service from a telecommunication service provider and starts using the service, data related to the service consumed is received, rated and charged in a centralized manner using either an Intelligent Network (IN) or specialized Billing or Revenue Management systems. Effective revenue management requires a seamless flow of data between the serving network and downstream systems for billing, fraud management, partner reconciliation and others. The data must be managed carefully so that records are not lost, duplicated, corrupted or rejected by the receiving systems. Breakdowns can have serious implications. The aforementioned conventional systems have a number of deficiencies which occur while executing operations right from transferring the data of a call detail record of the service consumed to the server till the billing of the service, consumed by the user, via the server of the billing management system.
A central control point of the billing management systems is usually bulky, highly capital intensive. This is because servers present in the central control point monitor the data of service consumption for a large volume of users which can run into several billion events per day. The central control point functions as a single point of failure for the system requiring massive investment on high availability and redundancies. Therefore, continuous maintenance and monitoring of secure working of the central control point is required in order to conduct hassle free operations in the central control point. Further, the existing billing management systems require monitoring each and every event made by users, capturing the raw call detail records, employing mediation system for formatting the raw detail records and a rating system for rating the call detail records and billing system for final billing.
The mediation system employed is responsible for executing a formatting process which is a pre-requisite process for facilitating the rating, charging and billing of the services consumed. In the formatting process, a call detail record of an event from a user device is sent to the central control point. It is to be noted that, an event is a single billable occurrence of the service, typically captured electronically by a network. The event along with attributes associated with the said event collectively forms the Call Detail Record (CDR). A data collector in the network switch captures the usage in a raw CDR. The raw versions of the CDR are then converted by the mediation system into a format understandable by the billing system. The mediation system applies various rules on the CDRs to process the CDRs. In one example, the mediation system may mark the international calls based on the dialed number (B-Number). In another example, the mediation system may mark on-net calls based on A-Number and B-Number. Once the CDRs are processed, the mediation System pushes the CDRs to the Billing System using File Transfer Protocol because usually the mediation system and the rating systems run on different machines.
The rating system receives the events in the form of call detailed records formatted by the mediation system. The rating system may process such CDRs describing the usage of a service. It must be understood that the CDR is a string of data that contains call information including call date, call time, call length, calling party, called party, etc., which are used to rate the events. The rating system further validates the CDR for any duplicate records, stores such CDR for later verification, determines the user account associated with the user, recognizes the event source, calculates cost/price of the event as per the rate plan associated with the service and then applies any discount if applicable. The billing system selects an account and obtains CDRs rated corresponding to the account for aggregation of all non-recurring, periodic, and chargeable events. The billing system also calculates all outstanding charges and available discounts and bonuses.
Therefore, apart from high maintenance and high capital investment, the current billing management, the existing billing management systems involve a time consuming back end processing for formatting the call detail records, rating and billing as described further below. Thus the overall back end processing system becomes bulky and involve time consuming activities, especially considering the processing of multiple events for such a large number of users consuming numerous services.
Additionally, the usage data captured by the central control point, in the existing billing systems, may vary from the actual usage recorded at the user's device thereby leading to discrepancy in the rating, charging and the billing of the services. Many a times, the carriers are found to usually count data correctly, but sometimes, the carriers tend to over count and hence potentially overcharge the user. For example, when the user uses applications that stream video or audio, and particularly when coverage is weak or unreliable, the user may be incorrectly overcharged due to error in capturing the correct usage. The Research has indicated that even typical use of a phone could lead the data to be over counted by 5 to 7 percent. This overcharging of the user is not only wrong but can expose the telecommunication operators to fraud lawsuits. Further, the existing system may not constantly update about the user's service consumption and the method it is rated making the whole process opaque for the user. Furthermore, the user does not receive any recommendation based on his service consumption and the availability of the services in the product catalogue.